Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.